My first day with Synfig

Hi! I’ve been working today on creating this animation using Synfig:
youtube.com/watch?v=ojrLRbvjfWo

A bit too sleepy now to explain all my impressions, but I want to say that I was positively surprised. I had never heard of Synfig before. I had in mind what I wanted to do with those snow photos, but I didn’t know of any Linux animation program, so I planned to do it in the command line, scripting Imagemagick from PHP for example.

But it was much easier to do with Synfig. I have a lot of experience in Adobe Flash, so I could start right away. The documentation was helpful, but not that easy. Sometimes all those thousands of words could be replaced by a few pictures :slight_smile: I mean, they were good explanations, but 1 picture = 1000 words :slight_smile: For example the explanation about TCB values could well be shown as graphs instead of words. Or even as small gif animations.

I was surprised that I could work with 20 large images (3000 x 2000), in a .lst of 1800 entries without any problems (I do have a i7 laptop, which helps), but I was really expecting it to explode :slight_smile:

The listimporter did not work correctly for framerates different from 15 FPS. Not in the version found in the Ubuntu Software Center, and not in the .deb package for download on your site. But I did read it’s been fixed.

A question that I didn’t see answered in the manual: if you can work using waypoints and no keyframes, when is it better to use keyframes? how should one approach the use of keyframes and waypoints? I guess I will have the answer when I read the docs a few times.

Thanks again for Synfig. I’m really looking forward to try out what else I can create with it, and what others have created. I didn’t check even one example, I went directly to do this movie which was my objective for today :slight_smile:

Really nice video! I love those speedy set of photos of changing scenarios.

Read this and repeat again the question :wink:
synfig.org/wiki/Keyframe

ah! and welcome to Synfig forums! You’ll enjoy it a lot! We are going to release a new version (0.62.02) in hours…

-G

That video is the neatest thing I’ve seen all day! It’s fun to watch the cycles of day/night, temperature, snow pulsating in and out. Fantastic! Excellent job evening out the illumation level.

This shows that synfig can do a lot more than cartoon-like works.